The how did people like Robert Scoble thrive for so long in Silicon Valley?

I agree that New York in particular (and also London) is also full of silver tongued charlatans, and that has a lot to do with the culture and cocaine of finance/ad-tech firms.

Okay, I can accept this. My hunch is that yes, it is easier to hype yourself up for a given company, but if there are fewer companies, you have fewer chances to do so, and therefore you're taking a bigger risk. Smaller cities can be big targets for con men because fewer con men are there and therefore one is less likely to know the given tactic that a con man will try.

This gets complicated into game theory and rationality and such. There's no way to know for sure, it's a good idea to be wise to these concepts regardless of location though. I still think that SV is incredibly overvalued, at this point in time, from both an employer and employee perspective.